The Kent Translation Case Study: Requirements and Working Procedures

Selecting the Text and the Advisor The Committee and the Defense The Schedule The Format of the Case Study Document The Case Study Text The Case Study Journal The Translation Analysis; Writing the Analysis Producing the Case Study Document The Terminology Section Style and Layout Guide

1. Planning for the Case Study: Requirements

The Case Study in Translation is a graduation requirement for all students enrolled in the M.A. in Translation in Modern and Classical Language Studies (French, German, Japanese, Russian and Spanish). The case study (also referred to below as the "project") is a test of translation, terminological, and research skills as well as a measure of the student's analytical and writing skills. This document states project requirements and recommendations.

1.1 Project Advisor, Selection of Source Text and Prospectus

Project advisors are Professors Françoise Massardier-Kenney in French, Sue Ellen Wright in German, Judy Wakabayashi in Japanese, Brian Baer in Russian and Carol Maier in Spanish. Other translation faculty (Professors Bell, Dunne, Koby, Shreve, Washbourne and L.D. Wright) will serve as alternate project advisors only if the primary project advisor has too many graduation candidates or if one of them is particularly suited to advise a particular project because of the topic selected. Both the primary project advisor and the alternate advisor must be consulted in such arrangements. Decisions concerning project advisor are usually made in the spring semester of the first year of study.

Students who are completing their degrees on a "part-time" or otherwise extended basis are requested to inform their advisor(s) in a timely way of their intention to complete the case study. This notification should occur during the spring semester of the year prior to graduation.

In consultation with the project advisor, the student will select a text for translation. (See Section 3 below for details.) The text selected should be equivalent to a minimum of 5,000 words. A group of related texts equaling 5,000 words may be selected. A prospectus describing the text must be completed, approved and signed by the advisor no later than October 15 of the second year of studies in the case of full-time students. If October 15 should fall on a weekend, the prospectus will be due on the Monday following the original deadline.

Pick up the prospectus form from Barb Bauer in the department office or download it, fill it in using Word, and print it out. Three copies of the prospectus must be submitted to the advisor for approval and signature. The prospectus should be accompanied by a copy of the document to be translated. The advisor will retain a copy of the prospectus and file a second copy with the translation coordinator. The advisor will give the student the third copy of the signed prospectus.

1.2 Project Committee and Project Defense

The project committee has 3 official members: the project advisor, a second member in the student's major language, and a third member who may be any member of the department interested in translation, generally someone who specializes in a language different from the candidate's source language. All usually come from the department of Modern and Classical Language Studies, although the third reader can come from another department in special cases. The primary members of the committee are selected by the candidate and the project advisor in consultation. Do not personally ask a faculty member to serve on your committee. Discuss your preferences with your project advisor first, and he or she will contact the other faculty member. You will be informed once the committee has been officially formed.

There may be an outside consultant present at the project defense, typically someone expert in the subject area of the project who has assisted the candidate during the preparation of the case study. The consultant is not a voting member of the committee, and there is no requirement that there be an outside consultant. The membership of the committee can be indicated as an addendum to the prospectus at the time the prospectus is submitted (the outside consultant, if any, may be indicated later).

An open invitation is issued to all members of the department to attend project defenses, with the request that attendees who are not members of the committee inform either the candidate or the advisor in advance. This is a courtesy so that the candidate will know who will be in attendance. It is not customary to invite family members or close friends from outside the department unless these individuals classify as experts.

The advisor and the student will agree on a work schedule which may require many consultations, drafts and revisions. After the final draft of the translation case study is submitted, the project advisor convenes the approved project committee. The candidate will present an oral defense of the case study before the committee.

The format of the defense itself typically has the following pattern: Short introduction to the project, where the candidates present the main facets of their projects, their motivation for the choice of text, etc. Questions and discussion period, where the members of the committee bring up items for discussion, which may range from concerns about potential mistranslations to questions of style and philosophy. Each defense is as different from other defenses as the differences in texts, candidates, and committees. The Institute enjoys a tradition of collegiality and courtesy during defenses. Students who wish to use PowerPoint during their presentations are invited to do so, bearing in mind that visual materials like all other aspects of presentation and writing are only as strong as the content they represent.

1.3 Master Schedule

The following master schedule lists the minimum requirements for completion of the case study project. The indicated dates are for the academic year during which the case study is completed. If the deadlines given below fall on a weekend, then the drafts and final versions will be due on the Monday following the deadlines given.

End of Spring semester of the first year: Selection of topic and advisor October 15: Submission of the prospectus December 1: Submission of a 3-page précis of the text and the preliminary list of terms from text January/September, First Friday of Semester: LAST DAY TO SUBMIT APPLICATION FOR SPRING/FALL GRADUATION [Forms available in the Graduate Office, 108 Bowman; file the NON-THESIS FORM .] February 15: Submission of the first draft to the advisor and a draft terminology file for review on the departmental server or in a file attachment submitted to the advisor March 15: Submission of critical analysis for the translation to the advisor April 19: Submission of three UNBOUND copies (or as needed for additional readers) of the final version of the Case Study Document delivered to the advisor; these copies should be presented in three-ring binders [NOT PERMANENTLY BOUND!]. Paragraphs must be numbered in parallel in both the source and the target text so that it is easy to refer back and forth between the two. Cite these paragraph numbers when discussing specific parts of the document in the analysis. [Note: it is OK to change paragraph boundaries, but ensure that you maintain parallel numbers for parallel segments.] No later than Friday of the week before finals week : Conduct defense. Determine date in consultation with advisor and members of the committee; give committee members at least seven days to read and critique the project. NOTE CHANGE: No later than Friday of finals week: Hand in revised case study. Failure to meet this deadline will result in an incomplete for the course and will delay graduation until revised case study is handed in. The revised copy of the case study, plus electronic versions of the source and target translation texts, of the analysis, and of the bilingual terminology file must be submitted to the Translation Coordinator. (Advisors may request a second hard copy for their own files.)

No project defenses will be scheduled for the summer. Fall project defenses will be held only in special circumstances, e.g., in the case of part-time students. In the event of a fall project, the student and the advisor should work out a formal schedule comparable to the spring schedule listed above.

2. Format of the Case Study

2.1 Basic Parts of the Case Study Document

The translation case study text is the source text that is translated. The translation case study document is the complete set of materials that is submitted to the project committee for review and defense. The translation case study document consists of five mandatory parts:

The Case Study translated text The Case Study source text The analysis of the Case Study A terminology section Pertinent parallel and secondary texts, if applicable

2.2 Format of the Case Study Document

The Case Study Document must have the following parts, assembled in the specified order (variations from this order must be pre-approved by the advisor).

Title Page Table of Contents Acknowledgments (identify committee members and all consultants by name) Translation (number the paragraphs in the translation to mirror the numbered paragraphs in the source) Source Text (number the paragraphs in the source text to mirror the numbered paragraphs in the translation) Translation Analysis (approximately 5,000 words or 20 pages) Bibliography. Be sure to cite parallel and background texts (use MLA style) Terminology (use standard format; see Section 7 below.)

3. Case Study Text

As noted above, the student will select a text for translation in consultation with the project advisor. The text selected should be equivalent to approximately 5,000 words . Students are advised to select a text that represents a serious area of translation activity, for instance, a scholarly, commercial, legal, scientific, technical, or literary work. The text should be the kind of text that a professional translator (including literary translators) would actually translate for publication. Many students choose a field of study where they would like to work in the future or a literary author whose work  they genuinely think would enjoy success in the United States. You should select the general field for your text during the second semester of the first year of the program in order to facilitate a rational choice of project advisor, because different advisors work with different general topics.

Provided that a suitable advisor is available, the text can be a Web page or another type of localization project, such as help files, resources files, etc. In such cases, you will probably use special tools to prepare the project. It will be highly desirable if possible to recompile the project, e.g., as a Web page, upon completion of the project so that you can actually run the file in a browser. Attention to non-text-related localization issues will be as much a part of the translation process as the translation of the text itself.

Students should bear in mind that they will be working with this text over the course of two semesters, so they should choose something that is well written, representative of its text type and genre, and potentially worthy of publication. In addition to reading the text carefully before making a selection, it is not a bad idea to experiment with translating a few sample sentences.

4. The Case Study Journal

The Case Study Analysis is a required part of the Translation Case Study Document and, as noted above, should be approximately 5,000 words in length. The project committee will examine your analysis as closely as it does your translation. The Case Study Analysis is based on a journal.

The case study journal is a record of the translation process. You should maintain the record faithfully during the time the translation is being prepared. It is not acceptable -- and it is counterproductive -- to reconstruct a journal after the fact. The case study journal forms the foundation from which you will later build your analysis. It is not, however, handed in with the Translation Case Study Document.

The journal is not a report or an analysis in itself. It is a simple running commentary in which the translator records decisions made, problems encountered, strategies tried, and solutions discovered during the act of translation. The comments made by the advisor and by other readers will also provide important material for the journal. It is probably most useful to think of the translation journal as a collection of observations for you to draw upon later when you must write your analysis. The more complete your journal, the easier it will be to write your analysis.

5. The Translation Analysis

5.1 Resources

When documenting the translation process and writing your analysis, you will want to be sure to use appropriate terminology for translation approaches, procedures, and strategies and to be aware of work that has been done in the past with respect to the theory and practice of translation. It is suggested that you consult the following resources:

For a systematic treatment of the terminology used in translator training, see Jean Delisle, Hannelore Lee Jahnke, and Monique Cormier, Translation Terminology. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1999, as well as the standard Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet, Comparative Stylistics of French and English: a Methodology for Translation, translated and edited by Juan C. Sager and M.-J. Hamel. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1995.

For a discussion of text types and text analysis for specialized translation, see Albrecht Neubert and Gregory Shreve, Translation as Text. Kent State University Press , 1992. Also consult other authors whose work you have read in the Translation Theory course.

For literary texts in particular, use the terminology of standard literary analysis. Refer to the pertinent translation theorists to whom you have been introduced in the Literary and Cultural Translation course, and to current work in translation studies (e.g., Susan Bassnett, André Lefevere, Sherry Simon, Lawrence Venuti, etc.). You should also demonstrate your awareness of any relevant criticism involving your author, the period of the text, the genre, etc.

For students working in German, additional resources include the Handbuch Translation, 2., verbesserte Auflage, Mary Snell-Hornby, Hans G. Hönig, Paul Kußmaul, and Peter Schmitt, eds.. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1999. For technical texts, there is Peter Schmitt's Translation und Technik , Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1999.

5.2 Initial Source Text Analysis

Comprehension: What problems did you have understanding the general language of the text, specific terms, and the subject of the text? Did background texts provide relevant information?

Text type: What kind of text is it? What are the stylistic features that characterize this type of text and what are the features that make it different from other texts? For specialized texts, what are the characteristics of this text type (intentional aim, important information, semantic structure, coherence)?

Audience: Who was the intended or likely audience? Is cross-cultural adaptation or localization necessary? Why?

5.3 Initial Target Text Analysis

Text type: What is the text type of the target text? Are you translating into the same or a different text type? What are the cultural differences in reader expectations for this text type? For a literary text, what authors in the target language exhibit similar stylistic features or themes? Can they be used as parallel texts? For specialized texts, you can also consider standards of textuality or other theoretical features such as those discussed in Neubert and Shreve (Translation as Text) or in other standard theoretical works. If you do use such criteria, be sure to cite the sources of the concepts you used when you write your analysis later.

6. Producing the Project

6.1 The Translation Process -- Initial Text Production­­

When addressing your project, it is important to distinguish between the overall approach you will take, the strategies you will use to achieve a fluent target text, and the processes involved. (Delisle's Translation Terminology provides a good overview of these criteria.)

Translation Approach: You must decide whether to translate quite directly or with greater freedom relative to the linguistic structure of the target. Which approach is appropriate for your text and for the general text type? Is one approach appropriate for part of your text and another appropriate elsewhere? Some of the major theorists you have read may be useful in making this decision.

Translation Strategies: As you work through the translation of your text, you will find yourself using various strategies to solve specific translation problems. Take care to define for yourself those strategies that you choose to use and document how you used them. Do some of your choices fail? If so, why, and which strategies will you use to replace them? Record your attempts and date them in your log so that you can examine the evolution of a passage or sentence over several versions. These items will be useful when you prepare your analysis, but the analysis SHOULD NOT consist of a linear catalog of strategies and examples.

Translation and Terminology Research: Do not cut corners in collecting parallel texts and other resources to support the translation process. Your first source of information may be from the Internet, but do not fail to examine available print media as well. Your committee will look very carefully at your choice of resource materials. Ideally, you should cross-validate terminological choices and even the content of the text against your support materials.

6.2 Final Text Production -- The Editing Phase

Revision for thematic and structural reorganization (i.e., for specialized texts): Do you have to rearrange the order in which ideas are presented in the text? If so, why? Do you have to change the actual format or linguistic organization of the textual segments -- for instance, delete a "conclusion" and turn it into a "prologue", move an abstract, etc.?

Revision for style: Do you want to make changes in the translated text purely for stylistic reasons, for readability, or for idiomatic fluency? This could include some complex strategies such as theme/rheme recasting, etc. Are there differences in the logical order in which ideas are presented between the source and the target texts? These are operations that novice translators often perform during an editing pass after first completing a "rough" translation. Can you classify your revisions? These kinds of changes occur in all translations, but are very important for literary translation.

Revision for cohesion: Do you feel the need to make changes to lexical items and phrases in order to introduce greater cohesion into the text? Do you see the need to abandon cohesive devices present in the source text and to use different ones in the target text?

Revision for register: Is it necessary to accommodate different levels of language between the source and the target text?

These questions will vary according to the kind of text you are translating, the quality of the original, and the cultural distance between the source and target audiences. Not all the items cited here will apply for every project, and when you write your analysis, you should only discuss those elements that are relevant to your text and your working decisions.

6.3 Writing the Translation Analysis

The analysis should be a coherent discussion of the translation process. It is an expository essay and you should follow the guidelines given during the Research and Writing course. Remember that as an essay, the analysis is about your translation, the translation process itself, and the special factors affecting the translation of this particular text. With a few exceptions, it should not be a diary-like narrative told in the first person detailing the individual steps in your process. Essential elements of the essay include:

Introduction and general approach to the translation: Present your project briefly, describing your general approach and indicate the outline you will follow in your paper, as is proper for standard essay writing in English. In getting started, you may use the first person where it is natural to explain why you chose the text, but after the Introduction, it is inappropriate to continue with an extended first-person narrative.

Discussion of the source text: Describe the source text briefly, reflecting your answers to questions posed in Section 5.2 above. Did you encounter any special problems at this stage in the process?

Preparing the target text: What kinds of issues, especially those treated under Sections 6.1 and 6.2, were most relevant to the preparation of the target text? How did text type and stylistic issues affect the decisions you made while translating specialized or literary texts? What kind of research was necessary? What kinds of parallel texts did you choose? How did you verify and validate the information you found? Did you use a consultant, and if so, when and how?

General translation process: Reflect for yourself on the way in which you approached the actual processing of the target text. Did you proceed sentence-by-sentence through the source and then revise afterwards? Did you do a paragraph at a time? Did you read the source text completely through and then translate? Or did you read a paragraph or section at a time and then translate in sections? If you used a translation tool, did you find yourself working along a sentence at a time? If so, how did this affect the overall cohesion of the text? Without lapsing into a sequential narrative (first I had breakfast, then I sat down at the computer ...), integrate your answers to these questions into the broader structure of your analysis.

Specific translation process: This should be a major part of your essay. Present your discussion in some kind of logical order, which should ideally be dictated by the critical features of your text. Within the framework of your overall discussion, you will want to consider the strategies you employed and the solutions you reached using these strategies, but this information should be folded into the flow of your main discussion. Do not catalog strategies as the primary focus of your analysis. If you used special tools to produce the text, such as a translation memory or localization program, reflect on the effect that the tool has had on the production phase. What are its good and its bad aspects?

Terminological discussion: Discuss any specific problems that you encountered with terminology. Were there distinct patterns that evolved with respect to terminology? In the case of some specialized texts, terminological issues become the main focus of the analysis.

Conclusion: Summarize the analysis and indicate how successful you think the translation was. Are there problems still remaining? What are they? Are there things you could have done differently? For specialized texts, you might want to appraise the result in terms of readability and fluency. For literary texts, you might indicate what you tried to accomplish and whether it was possible. Are there significant conceptual differences between the source and the target language communities that affect term formation or knowledge organization? Do link your observations to theorists whose writing has informed your decisions and your analysis.

These are suggestions of issues that are likely to be pertinent to your texts, but that should be adapted for each particular case. Your outline will be determined by the kind of text you chose and the kind of approach you selected. For obvious reasons, a highly specialized text with a rigid text type will require a more substantial discussion of terminology, while a literary text will entail a significant discussion of stylistic features. Different approaches and strategies may be involved depending upon these considerations.

Students frequently ask to look at previous Case Studies. The best practice is to consult with your advisor to ensure that you have the opportunity to examine high-quality projects that are similar to the one you are doing. It can be counter-productive to model your analysis or presentation on a Case Study that may not have been highly rated when it was reviewed. If you happen to look at a project that impresses you, be sure to discuss it with your advisor before using it as a model. Always bear in mind that even if another project is very good, your project is unique and should not mimic anyone else's approach.

7. Terminology

The terminology collection should follow the minimum standard terminology format used in the Institute for Applied Linguistics as evidenced in the models introduced in MCLS 60011. Students should use the MultiTerm for Windows terminology management system or some other comparable TMS. The terminology pertaining to the case study is a translation-oriented resource constructed by the translator for his or her own use. Terms included in the termbase should be those for which the translator had to do research, and/or for which the translator wishes to supply documentation. Terminology work should be initiated immediately, as soon as translation work on the case study begins. The glossary should be constructed as terms are encountered, researched, and resolved. It defeats the purpose of terminology management to do the translation and then try to reconstruct the termbase after the fact. Your advisor should be able to look at your terminology and give you suggestions at any point during the preparation of the Case Study.

The selection of terms to include in the Case Study involves several considerations: Document those terms or terminological units that are central to your project. Donotincludeitemsofcommonknowledge(e.g.,copper=Kupfer=cuivre=cobre). You may include such items for your own use, but filter them out when you prepare the terminology section of the Case Study Document. Some texts result in huge terminology collections. You may want to downsize the published version to about 50 to 60 terminological entries. On the other hand, literary translations may on occasion provide a limited number of strictly terminological problems. Discuss with your advisor(s) whether your text lends itself to a study of the author's unique personal lexicon. Sometimes it is useful to document dialectal or period-specific use of words and terms.  The final hardcopy version of the glossary should be prepared using the MultiTerm RTF dictionary export feature, accompanied if necessary by the appropriate filter. The glossary itself should be arranged in source language/target language order (e.g., French-English, German-English, Spanish-English).  It should be accompanied by an alphabetical listing of term equivalents (i.e., English-French, etc.) produced using the MutliTerm Glossary feature included in the Word-MultiTerm "Insert" menu .

Dr. Sue Ellen Wright is currently the terminology advisor. Consult her whenever you are ready to begin creating your termbase. She will help you set up your file or provide you with software if you wish to work on your own PC. If you wish to work on the MAC, you will need to be able to install a Windows-based program and to provide PC-compatible files to your advisor or to Dr. Wright for their examination. When it comes time to produce an attractive printout of your terminology file, consult the MultiTerm 95 Plus manual, pp. 89-92 and the PowerPoint presentation, Exporting MultiTerm Data, in order to review the procedure. If necessary, contact Dr. Wright or the Lab assistants for help.

8. Style and Layout Guide

Many students repeat the same stylistic errors that have been committed by other students in other years. This sometimes makes advisors and readers a bit testy. The following list of tips may help you avoid any kind of irritation.

8.1 Organization and General Layout for the Case Study

Number the paragraphs in the original text and in the translation so that it is easy for readers to move back and forth between them. In your analysis, whenever you refer to individual points in the text, be sure to include the relevant paragraph numbers so that your readers can orient themselves to what you are talking about.

1" margins are generally good, but provide yourself with 1.25" on the left margin to allow for a binding margin. If you want to print on both sides of the paper, set the margins up to alternate on odd and even pages.

8.2 Punctuation Rules

Be sure to watch out for punctuation with regard to restrictive and non-restrictive clauses. Traditional grammars (prior to the latest Chicago Manual of Style) dictated that that be used as the relative pronoun for linking a restrictive clause and that which be used for non-restrictive clauses. Many careful stylists still adhere to this rule, but the new CBS allows the use of which for either, which reflects British usage and a growing use of this convention in US English. What is not allowed, however, is the use of that for non-restrictive clauses. So if you feel the need for a comma in creating a relative clause, assume that the clause is non-restrictive and DO use which, not that. And don't use commas for restrictive clauses as it changes the meaning to non-restrictive. Watch out for exclamation points. English uses them rarely (outside of comic strip environments). Word will produce proper "printers' quote marks". Unfortunately, this Web document does not use these marks. Especially if you have blocked and moved in text from other environments, you may find that you have some so-called "hash marks" instead, i.e., the mathematical quote marks used frequently in math character sets and that are included on typewriters and in standard ASCII--i.e., ". Be sure to spot these anomalies and correct them. If you use a different language designation from American English, you may have problems getting the printers' quotes or your system may want to produce German or French ones. If you are writing in English, be sure to set your language for English. In American English, the quotation marks always follow the comma or period at the end of a sentence, even it seems much more logical to put them on the other side because they only go with part of the sentence. When writing for British or European publication, you can follow your logical instincts and put them back where they really belong.

8.3 Bulleted Lists

The use of bulleted lists is highly recommended in special texts in English, frequently in situations where the original text embedded a series of parallel items in running text. German (and perhaps other languages as well) frequently uses hyphens to represent bulleted items. English much more frequently uses a single large dot (bullet). Use the "Bullet" feature in WP or Word to program the character you want to use and to ensure that your bulleted lists stay neat no matter which computer or printer is used to process your file. You can choose whether you want to use one of several sizes of dot-bullets or customize a character. German and French use semicolons at the end of each bulleted item and a period at the end of the final item. American English offers two options: For full sentences: a period after each item For sentence fragments: no punctuation after any of the items Furthermore, American English offers two options for capitalization in bulleted lists: For full sentences: mandatory initial capital For sentence fragments: optional initial upper or lower case, BUT consistency required throughout the text In making capitalization decisions, don't be guided by the capitalization rules of the source language. For instance, capitalizing nouns and not adjectives looks a bit bizarre in English. Maintain parallel structures throughout each individual set of bulleted items, i.e., all gerund constructions, all sentences, all infinitive constructions, etc. Of course, different lists can be structured differently. In English, imperative structures (when giving instructions) and gerund structures are stronger than passive implied imperatives. Some languages can embed bulleted lists inside of sentences. What this means is that an introductory fragment can be followed by a bulleted list, which is in turn followed by the final predicate element of the sentence. This kind of embedding is not common in English. All standard expository information precedes the bulleted list, and the list closes the paragraph. Start the next sentence as a new paragraph after the list.

8.4 Layout and Spacing

Watch out for layout markers in the text that may get misplaced as you move illustrations or tables around in the text. If your sentence says, "The following diagram shows ...," then the diagram should indeed follow this statement instead of coming before it. One way to avoid this kind of thing happening is to number your illustrations and always just refer to the Figure number. This way you can move them around without tracking where you've referred to them in the text. Typesetters have always used a single space after periods, and today's computer-generated true-type fonts do so as well. Only type a single space after a period, but if you were taught to type two spaces, you don't have to relearn your typing skills. Just set the Word automatic correction feature to enforce the one-space rule. Full justification isn't really recommended, and if you feel compelled to use it, be sure your kerning feature is on and that you use careful hyphenation to ensure attractive lines. Extraneous white space is ugly. Underlining for emphasis is old hat. Use boldface or boldface and small caps plus a slightly larger font size for first-level headers, bold and italics for second, italics for third, and if you get as far as a fourth level, you've probably gone too far. In running texts, use italics for emphasis. Tabs: The standard .5" tab provided by your word-processing program is generally viewed by typesetters as being too wide. A good rule of thumb for 12 point fonts is .3". Don't use carriage returns and tabs to create hanging indents (like the ones used in this list). Use your word processor's hanging indent or the bulleted list features. DO use tabs and hanging indent to position words on the page rather than using the space bar. An even better solution is to use invisible tables to position items on the page. If you want columns, DO use the column feature or create a table; don't try to police a column layout using tabs or hanging indents, or even worse, the space bar. Don't use tabs and the space bar to try to position captions with respect to the figures or tables that they illustrate. Find the caption feature that is part of your graphics objects and use it instead. This way the caption becomes a part of your graphic and will always move with it when you reposition graphics in your text. Don't leave single lines (or headers or captions) stranded at the top or bottom of a page. Avoid this kind of thing by using the keep text together feature of your word-processor. Set the widows and orphans feature so that you can prevent undesirable line separation in normal paragraphs. Be sure that headers, captions and the like are on the page with the item that they introduce or explain. Sometimes the Word "keep text together" feature doesn't work, in which case you can use carriage returns to position the text, but this is not recommended until you print the final versions of your document. Check out the position of your illustrative items in a rough-draft print. Sometimes things creep around on the page because changes you made higher up in the document disrupt the appearance of surrounding text. Generally speaking, your text may move down, but your graphics will remain anchored to a spot on the page unless you specifically move them around.

8.5 English Style

Try to avoid strings of "of the ...of the ... of the" phrases. When multiple prepositional phrases are unavoidable, think about ways to use more precise prepositions to avoid repetition. Other languages frequently use copious synonyms for the same technical term. English more frequently prefers the use of consistent terminology throughout the text. In non-technical texts, however, "elegant variations" are acceptable and often desirable in English writing, and it might be advisable to use synonyms or paraphrase if the source language has a greater tolerance for repetition than does English.

8.6 Translation Management Criteria

If you make a decision on a particular terminological item or a turn of phrase that recurs elsewhere in the text, be sure to track it throughout the text and bring all instances of this problem into compliance with your new strategy. If there are stylistic or semantic differences that dictate that you not do this, it's a good idea to discuss the issue in your analysis so that your readers know why you chose different solutions in different contexts.

Date: 2005-09-19